Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn, who died on January 27 aged 87, was an American political
activist lionised by the Left; his book A People's History of the United
States became a bestselling revisionist alternative to conventional
history books and was endorsed by celebrities such as Bruce Springsteen and
Ben Affleck.

Zinn, right, being arrested at an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in the 1960s

6:43PM GMT 31 Jan 2010

Published in 1980 with little promotion and a first print run of only 5,000, A People's History became a million-seller in America, attracting a wide audience mainly through word of mouth. At a time when few politicians dared even to call themselves liberal, A People's History wove an openly Left wing narrative. Zinn accused Christopher Columbus and other explorers of genocide, rubbished the reputation of presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin Roosevelt, and glorified workers, feminists and anti-war protesters.

One hostile critic, reading Zinn's account of Columbus's landfall in 1492 (told from the point of view of the indigenous Arawak Indians), assailed "the deranged quality of his fairy tale". Even liberal historians were uneasy with Zinn, some regarding him as a polemicist rather than a historian.

Overtly biased, Zinn himself acknowledged that he was not trying to write an objective history, or a complete one. He called his book a response to traditional works, the first chapter – not the last – of a new kind of history. "The orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times," he noted.

His famous admirers included his friends, the actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, both of whom grew up near Zinn in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They repeatedly plugged the book in their Academy Award-winning screenplay for the film Good Will Hunting (1997). As well as Springsteen, film director Oliver Stone was also a fan.

Howard Zinn was born on August 24 1922 in New York, the son of Jewish immigrants. His father struggled to support the family by washing windows, hawking men's ties from a pushcart and working as a waiter. As a child Howard lived in a rundown area in Brooklyn and was strongly influenced by the novels of Charles Dickens, of which – thanks to the promotion of a cheap edition in the New York Post – he owned a complete set by the age of 10.

When he was 17, urged on by some local young communists, he attended a political rally in Times Square. "Suddenly, I heard the sirens sound, and I looked around and saw the policemen on horses galloping into the crowd and beating people," he recalled. "And then I was hit. I woke up sometime later in a doorway, with Times Square quiet again, dreamlike, as if nothing had transpired. I was ferociously indignant."

During the Second World War, Zinn joined the US Army Air Corps and from 1943 flew missions throughout Europe on a B-17 bomber named "Belle of the Brawl". Although decorated with an Air Medal, he found himself questioning his actions. On his return home, he gathered his medals and papers, put them in a folder and wrote on top: "Never again."

He attended New York and Columbia Universities, where he received a doctorate in History. In 1956, he accepted the chairmanship of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, an all-black women's school in Atlanta, a city which was then racially segregated.

During the flowering of the civil rights movement, Zinn encouraged his black students to request books from the whites-only public libraries and helped co-ordinate sit-ins. He also published several articles, including an attack – rare in its day – on the Kennedy administration for being too slow to protect black people.

He was loved by students – among them a young Alice Walker, who later wrote The Color Purple – but not by administrators. In 1963 Spelman College sacked him for "insubordination." (Zinn was a critic of the school's non-participation in the civil rights movement.) The following year he accepted a post at Boston University, where, despite similar feuds with its administration, he was to remain until his retirement in 1988.

Typically, Zinn spent his last day of class on the picket line with students in support of an on-campus nurses' strike. Afterwards he continued to lecture at schools and to appear at rallies and on picket lines.

As well as A People's History, Zinn wrote several other books, including the memoir, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (1995), which became the title of a 2004 documentary about his career. He also wrote three plays, including his musical drama Emma (1976) about the Russian-born American anarchist Emma Goldman.

Zinn updated A People's History to include chapters on the presidencies of George HW Bush and Bill Clinton. One of his last public writings was a brief essay, published last month in the Left wing American journal The Nation, about the first year of the Obama administration: "I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president – which means, in our time, a dangerous president – unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction."

Howard Zinn's wife, Roslyn Shecter, died in 2008. They had two children.